The Cook Read online

  One Sunday in mid-August, I meet up with Mauro in Vincennes. By the side of the lake, near the quay, we wait for our boat, sitting in the grass in the cool shade of an apple tree. He went to bed at three in the morning and he has dark circles under his eyes, the lean body of a marathon runner. He slowly licks his pistachio ice cream. By the time our brightly colored skiff arrives, my friend has fallen asleep, so I spend the rest of the afternoon reading my book, sitting close to him, waving away the wasps that hover above his T-shirt.

  Mauro completes the summer at Les Voltigeurs, losing seven pounds while replenishing his pockets. But when the fall arrives, he tells the owners that he’s leaving. The women’s eyes widen, their jaws drop. They don’t understand: Les Voltigeurs is all about continuity; he belongs to a professional world here, he has a place. They feel betrayed: This kid is so ungrateful! Mauro phones me in the evening to tell me about his departure, and I can sense that he’s anxious, keyed up, and for the first time I hear him say that he can’t stand any more of this grind, that these family businesses where you work from 7:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m. seven days a week, they’re just not his thing: They’re all too emotional—I’m not their kid! I’m not like them. I have a life. What I want is a simple job, normal hours, regular pay, you know?

  * * *

  September 2006. Mauro kisses the two women on their cheeks. They ball their fists on their hips and tease him, laughing: Go see if the grass really is greener, go on, but come back quick—this is your home! They calmed down when he told them what he was planning to do: go back to school, after his post-Erasmus sabbatical year, and earn a master’s at the Institute for the Study of Economic and Social Development. They’re impressed, they nod approvingly: the intimidating, coded world of academia is much easier for them to swallow than another restaurant.

  Mauro’s decision also comes as a surprise to his friends, who are beginning to find it hard to understand what he’s up to: I mean, what’s the plan exactly, postgrad studies or being a chef? He explains: going back to school is rooted in a desire to keep several irons in the fire, to spin several plates at once, like a Chinese juggler, so that he will always have something going on if one of the plates falls to the ground and smashes. He’s probably also seeking to develop what is already quite an original résumé, which—he senses—grants him a uniqueness, an open-mindedness, the ability to think more broadly. In a way, the speed of turnover that he has seen in the restaurant industry encourages him to bide his time; he is confident that there will always be opportunities. He thinks he’ll be able to find a few shifts to earn a bit of money—what he wants now is to go to Lisbon in November so he can be with Mia, hold her in his arms, breathe in the scent of her hair.

  * * *

  Then another restaurant offers him a job. Mauro goes to meet the chef, who is also the owner. What’s available is not a few extra hours but a full-time position. But while the rhythm of work at Les Voltigeurs stole whole days from him, as well as two-thirds of his nights, the hours here seem likely to produce a different outcome. In the fall of 2006, Mauro signs the contract—another minimum-wage CDI—and life speeds up again.

  Le Villon is a small but sophisticated bistro on Rue des Petits-Champs. The three-course prix fixe is thirty-five euros, the dishes fairly basic but well prepared. Twenty customers at lunch, forty in the evening, but only one shift and a small team to keep things ticking over: two cooks, including Mauro, and an overworked dishwasher. The chef is a calm guy with bushy long black hair, a face like a knife blade, and sea-blue eyes sunk deep under the prominent arch of his brows. Mauro is immediately drawn to his modesty and intensity; enthusiastic, Mauro thinks that he will finally be able to experience, close up, the workings of a restaurant on a human scale. In the first days, after the physical exertions of the brasserie in Montreuil, he finds the workload here pretty light. Only in the first days, though. Because, from October, when the master’s program starts to fill up his schedule, his days become crazily stretched out and segmented. He urgently needs to change his bike, to try something light—a quick, airy machine that will weave more easily through town. Mauro gets hold of a fixed-gear bike, pumps the tires to the limit, and speeds off every morning down Rue de la Roquette in the direction of Père Lachaise. From Tuesday to Saturday, his days are organized as follows: 8:00 a.m.–10:00 a.m.: master’s, lecture hall, Rue de Bagnolet; 10:00 a.m.–2:00 p.m.: Le Villon; 3:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m.: master’s, tutorial in Nogent-sur-Marne; 7:00 p.m.–11:30 p.m.: Le Villon.

  So he has to keep going—maintain this pace, get through the day, not let things slip out of control. Doing that means accepting a life without any downtime, with no space to breathe except in the 5:00–7:00 p.m. slot, that two-hour late-afternoon break when he sits at a table with his Perrier with a slice of lemon to read in the silent back room of a café on Rue du Château-d’Eau.

  His bike rides become moments of preparation during which he anticipates the next part of his day, goes over his to-do list in his head. Riding toward Le Villon, he reminds himself that he has to call such and such a supplier who didn’t turn up the previous day, change a bulb, try the carpaccio of pear with slivers of Roquefort; riding toward Nogent or Rue de Bagnolet, he thinks that he must get such and such a book from the library, develop this or that idea in his paper, find a way to talk to this or that professor. Far from being exhausted, he wakes up more excited with every passing morning, galvanized by the idea of being constantly in action, as if enveloped by that idea, by the thought that he is someone who always has something to do, someone who occupies a place in the process, whose hours and days result in concrete actions and accomplishments. It’s intoxicating. He barely even notices that his life—his social life, his love life—is drying up: the gang of six, his family, parties, movies, reading, days out … even Mia, whose face becomes more blurred day after day; Mia, whom he never went to see in Lisbon as he’d promised—no time, too much work—and whom he neglected when she paid him a surprise visit, leaving her asleep in the mornings and not seeing her again until the middle of the night, and by then he was too tired to lavish her with the affection she needed, too tired even to desire her, clearing his schedule for just one solitary afternoon so he could stroll with her through the backstreets of the quarter, without ever straying far from Le Villon, as if the restaurant were now the magnetic center of their relationship; Mia, who went back to Lisbon one day early, leaving a note on the bed, a short note, consisting of just a single word: Basta.

  4

  Blows

  One evening, a month or two after the end of his time at Le Villon, we are watching TV, Mauro and I, in that studio apartment in the thirteenth arrondissement, which he has kept—though its Spartan decor still gives the impression that he isn’t really living there. Top Chef is on. The French version of the reality competition show is a huge hit, as are all the other similar shows, whose ratings keep growing. The chef has become an important figure in contemporary society—a media star now remote from the grouchy guy who produced dishes from the shadows of his lair—and kitchens have become television studios. Mauro lists aloud the various programs—MasterChef, Oui Chef!, An Almost Perfect Dinner, The World’s Best Pastry Chef—and I am amazed by how many there are. My friend shrugs: It’s obvious that when people talk about cooking, they don’t talk about the rest, all the bad things going on in the world; it’s obvious that people are always more interested in gastronomy during those periods when there’s lots of anxiety: it’s reassuring, it brings people together, it’s about the body, about pleasure, it’s about sharing, theatricality, truth. Face darkening, he adds: Competition, discipline, merit: everyone watches it, and it keeps them calm and happy. On the screen, an immense kitchen scattered with multiple islands; the contestants stand in a row, arms crossed, listening to the presenter reminding them of the rules of the contest in a voice supercharged with enthusiasm. The goal is to create a dish around a pigeon. When the timer starts, the contestants rush to their countertops, in a panic, their thoughts sc
rambled, then each of them calms down and begins cooking. The pressure mounts as the clock ticks down.

  Are you sure you want to watch this? I ask, surprised. Mauro doesn’t answer, his eyes riveted to the image of those young people peeling, cutting, boiling. The stainless-steel utensils glisten in the spotlights; as does the food, which looks as if it were painted with varnish; as do the young chefs themselves, magnificent in aprons or in tight-fitting, dazzlingly white jackets. The camera lingers on their gestures, their meticulous hands, hands that seem to multiply like those of an Indian goddess, butchering a pigeon while simultaneously buttering a pie base. Drops of sweat bead on their faces as the countdown progresses, as the presenter talks with a famous chef, the two of them highlighting the contestants’ qualities, their hard work, their hunger to surpass themselves, their heroism. Their teeth gleam as they speak. Suddenly, Mauro stands up, spitting acerbically: Cooking is not the shiny happy world they’re making it out to be; there’s not much affection, you know—and I can hear his teeth grind.

  Violence is an old refrain in kitchens. Physical blows, thrown objects and utensils, burns, insults. The close quarters that exacerbate all contact, so that you push one another, knock one another over, so that you cannot stand your neighbor’s elbow—Fuck off!—so that you defend your territory with your body, your square foot of space, so that you fight over machines and utensils. Stories emerge from kitchens: a commis chef who got punched for doing nothing when he was simply waiting for his saucepan to fill with water; another who got a plate in the face because the entrecôte was overdone; a third burned on the forearm by a spoon of boiling water or a red-hot blade because his beurre blanc wasn’t up to standard; and other tales of newbies bullied, humiliated, hazed—I remember that apprentice who started before everyone else, to get ahead of the game, who woke up two hours earlier to arrange his plates, and the chef, furious at this attempt to evade his authority, who swept his forearm across the table, sending everything crashing to the ground. But most violent of all is that this violence is considered by the cooks themselves to be part of the job, an immutable law to which they must submit, an initiation they must simply survive. They talk about it as if it were a venerable tradition, even a form of education. To become a chef, you have to be prepared to get hurt. People who commit to this life are forewarned: they implicitly accept that they will suffer, resist, become hardened, support the idea of a natural selection that will eliminate the frail, the weak, the hesitant, the rebellious.

  Obviously, this culture of violence goes hand in hand with a notion of solidarity that exists in kitchens. It’s kind of like a family, Mauro says, without taking his eyes off the Top Chef contestants, who move about in a frenzy on the screen, and who, for now, do not share any brotherly feelings for one another. I smile: Come on, Mauro, not that old family line! I wanted to remind him that not one of his colleagues had batted an eyelid when he quit Le Merveil after getting whacked in the face with that metal utensil, but he insists: I mean it—the chefs often feel responsible for “their youngsters” as they call them; they look after them, they worry about them, and most of the time they’re there for you if anything goes wrong.

  Yet he mentions another kind of violence: insidious, psychological. When a chef’s demanding nature becomes a tyranny, an obsession. When the pressure in the kitchen is spread beyond its walls by those who suffer it, who activate its perverse mechanism, who sometimes preempt it and, in doing so, amplify it. It is this management through pressure that, mixed with rivalry, leads to things being blown out of proportion: For example, when you arrive at work at eight a.m. as you were asked to and you find out that everyone’s been there since seven, working flat out. So, the next day, what do you do? You get there at seven, too. There is one thing, though, he makes clear, looking me straight in the eye: I’ve never yelled “Yes, chef!” when I’ve been given an instruction or an order, never. I remember a documentary on a prestigious restaurant in a famous Parisian hotel whose sound track might have been recorded at a military academy—West Point, for example, where young men in uniform yell “Yes, sir!” in response to each order shouted in their face.

  Mauro gets up and turns off the TV as the countdown continues on the screen—we won’t find out tonight the identity of the best chef of the season, the name of the person who will pocket the hundred thousand euros and the approval of a jury of Michelin-starred chefs. Mauro turns to me and freezes: But the worst kind of violence in this job, you know, the worst of all, in my opinion, is that the restaurant expects you to sacrifice everything for it, to give it your whole life.

  5

  CAP

  OLD-FASHIONED BLANQUETTE DE VEAU, RASPBERRY ZABAIONE

  When he gets back from Caracas, where he attended the World Social Forum in April 2006 (he isn’t especially impressed by Chávez), Mauro announces that he’s decided to take the professional cook’s CAP exam. The people around him are baffled, they don’t understand: Why on earth would he choose the CAP (Certificate of Professional Aptitude)? In other words, why would he want the kind of diploma usually taken by the dregs of the national education system—people who will end up as manual workers, engineers, people who will never go to college—when he himself has spent years in further education and even holds a master’s in economics? Seriously, if he does this, then what was the point of the Erasmus and all that stuff? His parents, anticonformist to the last, support him, happy that their son has found his path, but they make it clear that as far as they’re concerned, this is his last year of subsidized study. Sometimes the specter of a loss of status rears its head, concealed under commonsense remarks: You’re too old, Mauro, you’d be better off working, learning on the job. But Mauro holds firm: in reality, not only is the CAP a gauge of credibility in a professional world that is wary of slackers, dilettantes, middle-class shirkers fascinated by the culinary arts, it is also a symbolic gauge, the sign that he is willing to put in the hard yards, to accept the physical, technical, and prescriptive aspects of being a cook, to knuckle under its disciplinary requirements, to enter the tiled, metal-strewn backstage areas of the grand theater of French gastronomy—cultural heritage and national pride—and join the anonymous, invisible ranks of those who work in the shadows for its conservation, its expansion, its glory.

  * * *

  One year later, Mauro takes the exam as an unaffiliated candidate. That day, he puts on the chef’s uniform that he must wear for the practical tests, an outfit purchased at Monsieur Veste for sixty-eight euros: white trousers and jacket, special loafers, chef’s apron (down to his knees), and cap—he walks across the small garden, silent, the apron tied tight around his narrow torso, his long, thin arms hanging, and gives me a doubtful look: Is this okay? Do I look like a clown or what? I smile: he looks fine, completely credible. You look wonderful. After that, he gathers the utensils that he’ll need for the test, an impressive array of gear that he inventories in front of me, picking up each object one after another and stating its name, a bit like a magician presenting his hat, his wand, and his assistant to the audience before performing his first trick: whisk, carver, peeler, scraper, zester, scissors, spaghetti tongs, meat tongs, fork, pastry bag with a variety of tips, rubber spatulas, an Exoglass spatula and a flat patisserie spatula, a ladle, several soup- and teaspoons, a melon baller, an electric scale (he checks the batteries), and a series of knives chosen after a great deal of research (the steel blades are laid flat in the black case, all pointing the same way—boning knives, butcher’s knives, slicing knife, and paring knife, the sharpening steel). Mauro repeats their names, like a litany of weapons, finding it strange to be so heavily armed.

  * * *

  The day of the exam, he is one of four unaffiliated candidates to turn up at the technical lycée in the eighteenth arrondissement. Apart from Mauro, there are two men his own age and a woman in her thirties. The exam room is large, tiled: the slightest sound creates an echo, but for now it is bathed in the singular silence of an empty school.

 
Having already dispensed with the basic tests—math and French—Mauro has crammed for the two other written exams: the PSE (Workplace Health) and cooking theory. The first is a general-question exam, about different contracts, the ability to implement a budget, or to react to an accident; the second verifies the student’s knowledge of basic cooking techniques, of sanitary risks, the rules of hygiene, the organization of a kitchen, and so on. Mauro races through them.

  The practical exam worries him more: each candidate has four hours and thirty minutes to plan and then prepare two meals (starter and entrée, or entrée and dessert) for four to eight people, to present them, and then to tidy up, while examiners observe his actions, note his techniques, assess the results. Mauro bites his lip and his cap slips down his forehead a little when he discovers the subject written on the board: old-fashioned blanquette de veau, raspberry zabaione. Meals he has rarely cooked; deceptively simple meals—the blanquette in particular is tricky, the success of the dish being entirely dependent on the velvety texture of the sauce. The countdown begins. He rubs his chin. Determined not to rush, he goes over to his workstation and begins to set up. The two other guys are also concentrating, appropriating their spaces, organizing the ingredients and utensils. The older woman, on the other hand, panics as she inventories her food—Monsieur, I don’t have any carrots!—and one of the men gestures with his chin to a crate at the back of the room, without even uncrossing his arms. Mauro thinks, working out a plan of attack whose steps he writes down briefly in a notebook: the blanquette will simmer for three hours; during this time he will cook the mushrooms, blanch and sauté the pearl onions, and make the zabaione, which takes about twenty minutes. The sauce will be made later, with the broth from the meat. Mauro wonders for a moment how to deal with the raspberries and the cream between the meat and the mushrooms, imagining a raspberry blanquette and a mushroom zabaione, thinking that maybe they wouldn’t be too bad, then he smiles, picks up the meat, places it at the bottom of the Dutch oven, and pours water over it. And that’s it, he’s on his way.